My Library

by a French physician named Asgill. This writer undertook to publicly demonstrate and teach the art of life-prolonging, laying it down positively, that man is literally immortal, or rather that any given man alive could, if he choose, utterly laugh at and defy death; that he need not, if so disposed, ever die, if he used sufficient prudence, and forcibly and constantly exerted his will in that direction. Asgill used to complain of the cowardly practice of dying, considering it a mere trick, and unnecessary habit. The records tell us that several men have used both these means to perpetuate existence, and I have not the slightest doubt that it has been attempted and proved measurably successful; and now, on this stormy night, as I gazed on the withered wreck before me, it struck me that he was one of those wretches who had attained indefinite length of years by the second method, and, as a necessary consequence, had lost all fire, all feeling, all love, and all conscience. I shuddered as the possibility flashed upon me. He saw the motion, and a smile of ineffable scorn curled his lip as he did so. I abandoned my notion. “People who observe things as they plod their way through the world, and who have at all made the human soul a study, have often been made aware that there is a certain nameless something that comes over a man, that with resistless eloquence persuades his inner soul